Crown Street Surgery

NHS Training Practice Continuity

July 2021

Crown Street Surgery are an Acton, London, based practice servicing over 9,000 patients with clinics such as managing chronic disease, cancer screening, vaccinations and health checks. Notably they are an NHS medical student training practice.

July 2021

The Challenge

For Crown Street Surgery continuity of communications is essential, between staff and patients and, in their role as an NHS training practice, with medical students. Sherif Al-Marayati, Practice Manager, explains that "our ethos is really about being a training practice. We have registrars, F2s, and medical students from four different universities.

"We get a lot medical students coming in of different years. So, 365 days throughout the year, we've got medical students here helping us out, supporting us."

The arrival of the COVID pandemic jeopardised these communications given staff and practitioners needed to regularly self-isolate.

The Solution

Being a cloud based solution, Surgery Connect can function remotely exactly as it does within the practice. All functionality is available in any remote environment, usually from a home base during lockdowns: "During COVID it was a massive help. I think we really would've struggled without it. We knew that if a doctor, or a nurse, or even a healthcare assistant had to self isolate for a few days, and that happened repeatedly over the last 12 months, that we had that assurance that they could continue working.

"For the more tech savvy staff, the ability to switch from the desk to a mobile, from a softphone to mobile, or all three, has been very useful."

Surgery Connect X-flow allows authorised staff to create call flows simply by dragging icons in a graphical representation, providing full control of the practice's call handling and resource allocation. Sherif makes good use of the functionality: "I'm absolutely loving X-flow. X-flow's been really useful for us. Just for example, for COVID, I've set it up so there's four different options where we can send patients instructions of how to make bookings, or other information. So patients have lots of information and things that they can do automatically that they don't need to speak to us about. Every month it does save a few hundred phone calls."

Sherif finds the interfaces and reporting facilities intuitive and easy to use "Modifying, customising the user console is easy. I really like the customization of my user console. So, at the bottom, I have various KPIs and I can customise those even further."

Switching over to the new system was a smooth process for Crown Street Surgery: "Your guys came in beforehand and set everything up for us. The onboarding was fine, all very supported. The support on the go-live day was great. A very, very easy process and hassle free."